Obfuscation Of Data Research Articles

Ensuring Cryptography Chips Security by Preventing Scan-Based Side-Channel Attacks With Improved DFT Architecture

Cryptography chips are often used in some applications, such as smart grids and Internet of Things (IoT) to ensure their security. Cryptographic chips must be strictly tested to guarantee the correctness of the encryption and decryption. Scan-based design-for-testability (DFT) provides high test quality. However, it can also be misused to steal the cipher key of cryptographic chips by hackers. In this article, we present a new scan design methodology that can resist scan-based side-channel attacks by the dynamical obfuscation of scan input data and scan output data. The scan test is managed by a test password, which consists of load password and scan password. When the chip enters into the test mode, it is required to apply the test password via some external input ports. Once the correct load password is delivered, the scan password can be loaded into a special shift register. If the scan password is also correct, the chip testing can proceed normally. In case the load password or the scan password is wrong, the data in scan chains cannot be propagated correctly. Specifically, some elusory bits are sneaked into scan chains dynamically. The advantage of the proposed method is that it has no negative impact on design performance and test flow when powerfully protecting cryptographic chips. The area penalty is also acceptably low compared with other schemes.

Review of Kate Brown, Manual for Survival

In the thirty years since the Chernobyl disaster we have learned a great deal about the causes of the accident, the human side of the story of those who worked at the station, the operators and their families in the now-abandoned nearby town of Pripyat, the hundreds of thousands of “liquidators,” and the millions of individuals affected by fallout, including some 300,000 who were evacuated from various exclusion zones and heavily affected rural areas, mostly to the north and east in (Soviet) Belarus, Ukraine, and small parts of Russia. What are the long term consequences of radioactive fallout to land and living things? How many people have and will die from exposure to radioactivity? In Manual for Survival, Kate Brown documents the efforts of scientists and doctors in Belarus and Ukraine to understand the short- and long-term impact of radiation exposure on Soviet and post-Soviet citizens, and the challenges even to simple data collection. Her conclusions stand in stark contrast to those of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations (UN) Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation that estimated perhaps 5,000 total deaths. The numbers will be much higher, perhaps on the order of 10,000 or 50,000 excess cancers and premature deaths. But we shall never know with certainty owing to a variety of factors—including the challenges of conducting research in the former Soviet Union, the obfuscation of data in some quarters who appear to seek to minimize the impact, and scientific uncertainty itself.

Lipidomics biomarker studies: Errors, limitations, and the future

Lipidomics is an ever-expanding subfield of metabolomics that surveys 3000 to 5000 individual lipids across more than 56 lipid subclasses, including lipid peroxidation products. Unfortunately, there exists a large number of publications with poor quality data obtained with unit mass resolution leading to many lipid misidentifications. This is further complicated by poor scientific oversight with regard to recognition of isobar issues, sample collection, and sample storage issues that inexplicably requires more detailed attention. Inadvertent or intentional obfuscation of relative quantification data represented as absolute quantification is a subtle but profound difference that may readers outside of the field may not realize, therefore, instigating disservice and unnecessary distrust in the scientific community. These issues need to be addressed aggressively as high quality data are essential for the translation of biomarker research to clinical practice.

Ancile: Privacy-preserving framework for access control and interoperability of electronic health records using blockchain technology

Despite an increased focus on the security of electronic health records and an effort by large cities around the globe to pursue smart city infrastructure, the private information of patients is subject to data breaches on a regular basis. Previous efforts to combat this have resulted in data being mostly inaccessible to patients. Existing record management systems struggle with balancing data privacy and the need for patients and providers to regularly interact with data. Blockchain technology is an emerging technology that enables data sharing in a decentralized and transactional fashion. Blockchain technology can be leveraged in the healthcare domain to achieve the delicate balance between privacy and accessibility of electronic health records.In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework for secure, interoperable, and efficient access to medical records by patients, providers, and third parties, while preserving the privacy of patients’ sensitive information. Our framework, named Ancile, utilizes smart contracts in an Ethereum-based blockchain for heightened access control and obfuscation of data, and employs advanced cryptographic techniques for further security. The goals of this paper are to analyze how Ancile would interact with the different needs of patients, providers, and third parties, and to understand how the framework could address longstanding privacy and security concerns in the healthcare industry.

Hybrid Obfuscation Using Signals and Encryption

Obfuscation of software and data is one of the subcategories of software security. Hence, the outlines of the obfuscation problem and its various methods have been studied in this article. This paper proposes a hybrid of two signals and encryption obfuscation to hide the behaviour program and prevent reconstruction of the normal code by hackers. The usual signal method is strong enough for obfuscation, but its problem is the high complexity because of a lot of call and return instructions. In this study, a new dispatcher was added to the source code to reconstruct the original control flow graph from the hidden one to solve the problem of the signal method. This dispatcher code is encrypted to preclude access by the hacker. In this paper, the potency that makes the obfuscation strong has been increased and the resilience that makes the obfuscation poor has been decreased. The results of a comparison of the similarity among the ambiguous data with its original code and with available efficient methods present a performance advantage of the proposed hybrid obfuscation algorithm.

Accountability, Complacency, or Obfuscation? An Analysis of the U.S. Military’s Prevention and Response Efforts to Military Sexual Trauma

On December 3, 2015, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced the end of the combat exclusion policy prohibiting women from serving in direct combat roles, regardless of the service branch or military occupation. For many, this represented the final barrier to women’s opportunity for equality within the armed forces, since many jobs and promotions are tied to combat experience. However, this historically significant milestone is juxtaposed against a recurring problem for the military that threatens its state of readiness and national security: military sexual trauma (MST). This article explores the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual assault in the U.S. military, and the misleading, and often contradictory, data provided by military officials and the Department of Defense. The argument presented here is that the obfuscation of MST data has ethical implications for public administration, as it negatively impacts any meaningful prevention, intervention, and reform efforts. At a time of emerging global threats and with less than 1% of the American public currently serving in the all-volunteer military, can the nation continue to risk remaining ignorant about these preventable crimes against its service members?

Static and Dynamic Obfuscations of Scan Data Against Scan-Based Side-Channel Attacks

Due to the fallibility of advanced integrated circuit (IC) fabrication processes, scan test has been widely used by cryptographic ICs to provide high fault coverage. Full controllability and observability offered by the scan design also open out the trapdoor to side-channel attacks. To better resist signature attacks on scan testable cryptochip, we propose to fortify the key and lock method by the static obfuscation of scan data. Instead of spatially reshuffling the scan cells, the working mode of some scan cells is altered to jumble up the scan data when the scan test is performed with an incorrect test key. However, when the plaintext is fed directly through the primary inputs for test efficiency, the static obfuscation of scan data is inadequate as demonstrated by a new test-mode-only signature attack (TMOSA) proposed in this paper. To thwart TMOSA, a new countermeasure based on the dynamic obfuscation of scan data is proposed. By cyclically shifting the incorrect test key throughout the test phase, the blocking cells due to the mismatched bits of the test key are made to move temporally to dynamically obfuscate the scan data. This latter scheme is unconditionally resilient against TMOSA and all other known scan-based attacks while preserving the merits of high testability and low area overhead compared with other countermeasures.

Critical Evaluation of Adler’s Challenge to the cdc’s Male Circumcision Recommendations

We evaluate Peter Adler’s challenge to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc) draft recommendations on male circumcision (this issue, see pp. 237–262). Thecdcadvocates elective male circumcision (mc) to improve public health in theusabased on strong scientific evidence. In marked contrast to thecdc, Adler’s criticisms depend on speculative claims and obfuscation of the scientific data. Adler’s central argument that circumcision in infancy should be delayed to allow a boy to make up his own mind as an adult fails to appreciate that circumcision later in life is a more complex operation, entails higher risk, is more likely to involve general anaesthesia and presents financial, psychological and organisational barriers. These limitations are avoided by circumcision early in infancy, when it is convenient, safe, quick, low risk, usually involves local anaesthesia and provides benefits immediately. Benefits of male circumcision include: protection against: urinary tract infections that are ten times higher in uncircumcised infants; inflammatory skin conditions; other foreskin problems; sexually transmitted infections and genital cancers in the male and his female sexual partners. Circumcision during infancy is also associated with faster healing and improved cosmetic outcomes. Circumcision does not impair sexual function or pleasure. Some authorities regard the failure to offer circumcision as unethical, just as it would be unethical to fail to encourage paediatric vaccination. Since the benefits vastly outweigh the risks, each intervention is in the best interests of the child. In conclusion, Adler’s criticisms of thecdc’s evidence-based male circumcision policy are flawed scientifically, ethically and legally, and should be dismissed as endangering public health and individual well-being.

For the Good or the “Guild”

This letter/essay addresses some of the critiques and recommendations I have for the American Academic of Religion regarding its treatment of adjunct concerns.I recommend the American Academy of Religion reassess its values and prioritizes and ask that the organization decide if it is a nonprofit organization or a guild. Subsequently, I recommend the American Academy of Religion discontinue its obfuscation of data on adjunct existence in the field, readjust its membership dues and conferences fees with the monetary plight of its underemployed or unemployed members in mind, and avoid marginalizing or patronizing those members who find themselves within the cycle of contingent employment.

Privacy and spatial pattern preservation in masked GPS trajectory data

ABSTRACTPersonal trajectory data are increasingly collected for a variety of academic and recreational pursuits. As access to location data widens and locations are linked to other information repositories, individuals become increasingly vulnerable to identification. The quality and precision of spatially linked attributes are essential to accurate analysis; yet, there is a trade-off between privacy and geographic data resolution. Obfuscation of point data, or masking, is a solution that aims to protect privacy and maximize preservation of spatial pattern. Trajectory data, with multiple locations recorded for an entity over time, is a strong personal identifier. This study explores the balance between privacy and spatial pattern resulting from two methods of obfuscation for personal GPS data: grid masking and random perturbation. These methods are applied to travel survey GPS data in the greater metropolitan regions of Chicago and Atlanta. The rate of pattern correlation between the original and masked data sets declines as the distance thresholds for masking increase. Grid masking at the 250-m threshold preserves route anonymity better than other methods and distance thresholds tested, but preserves spatial pattern least. This study also finds via linear regression that median trip speed and road density are significant predictors of trip anonymity.

Establishing location-privacy in decentralized long-distance geocast services

The ability to communicate over long distances is of central importance for smart traffic applications like cooperative route planning or the discovery and reservation of charging stations for electric vehicles. Established approaches are based on centralized architectures with singular service providers. This setup leads to strong privacy concerns, as great amounts of sensitive location data need to be stored at a non-local, centralized entity. Decentralized approaches like the overlay-based geocast service OverDrivepropose to solve this issue by eliminating the central data sink and sharing location information with a small subset of other participants. In this paper, we propose techniques for further improving the location privacy offered by decentralized long-distance geocast services. Through obfuscation of location data and mechanisms for detecting location spoofing attempts, we can ensure that precise location data is only shared with participants in the physical vicinity. Simulation results show that our extensions render both the large scale surveillance and the targeted tracking of OverDrive users unfeasible even for strong adversaries controlling hundreds of overlay nodes. In addition, we discuss practical considerations when deploying decentralized and privacy-sensitive systems that rely on cellular networks and present results from an empirical evaluation of connectivity properties.

Obfuscation of Sensitive Data for Incremental Release of Network Flows

Large datasets of real network flows acquired from the Internet are an invaluable resource for the research community. Applications include network modeling and simulation, identification of security attacks, and validation of research results. Unfortunately, network flows carry extremely sensitive information, and this discourages the publication of those datasets. Indeed, existing techniques for network flow sanitization are vulnerable to different kinds of attacks, and solutions proposed for microdata anonymity cannot be directly applied to network traces. In our previous research, we proposed an obfuscation technique for network flows, providing formal confidentiality guarantees under realistic assumptions about the adversary's knowledge. In this paper, we identify the threats posed by the incremental release of network flows, we propose a novel defense algorithm, and we formally prove the achieved confidentiality guarantees. An extensive experimental evaluation of the algorithm for incremental obfuscation, carried out with billions of real Internet flows, shows that our obfuscation technique preserves the utility of flows for network traffic analysis.

Gene Expression during the Cell Cycle: Obfuscation of Original Cell-Cycle Gene Expression Data by Normalization

Normalization of raw data on gene expression during the cell cycle obscures the original experimental data and makes it appear as if all genes have the same numerical level of cyclical expression. Results that would not support gene expression because of minimal variations thus appear, after normalization, to be stronger than they actually are. Consideration of the effect of normalization raises critical questions about many experiments on the cell cycle dependent variation of gene expression—that is, proposed cyclical changes in mRNA content—during the cell

Resection margin involvement and tumour origin in pancreatic head cancer

Assessment of the origin of adenocarcinoma in pancreatoduodenectomy specimens (pancreatic, ampullary or biliary) and resection margin status is not performed in a consistent manner in different centres. The aim of this review was to identify the impact of such variations on patient outcome. A systematic literature search for articles on pancreatic, ampullary, distal bile duct and periampullary cancer was performed, with special attention to data on resection margin status, pathological examination and outcome. The frequent reclassification of tumour origin following slide review, and the wide variation in published incidence of pancreatic (33-89 per cent), ampullary (5-42 per cent) and distal bile duct (5-38 per cent) cancers indicate that the histopathological distinction between the three cancer groups is less accurate than generally believed. Recent studies have shown that the wide range of rates of microscopic margin involvement (R1) in pancreatoduodenectomy specimens (18-85, 0-27 and 0-72 per cent respectively for pancreatic, ampullary and distal bile duct cancers) is mainly caused by differences in pathological assessment rather than surgical practice and patient selection. As a consequence of the existing inconsistency in reporting of these data items, the clinical significance of microscopic margin involvement in each of the three cancer groups remains unclear. Inaccurate and inconsistent distinction between pancreatic, ampullary and distal bile duct cancer, combined with inaccuracies in resection margin assessment, results in obfuscation of key clinicopathological data. Specimen dissection technique plays a key role in the quality of the assessment of both tumour origin and margin status. Unless the pathological examination is meticulous and standardized, comparison of results between centres and observations in multicentre trials will remain of limited value.

Enhancing privacy in cloud computing via policy-based obfuscation

In this paper, we describe a privacy manager for cloud computing that controls policy-based obfuscation and de-obfuscation of personal, sensitive, or confidential data within cloud service provision. By these means, cloud computing users may reduce the risk of their private data being stolen or misused, and in addition assistance may be given to cloud computing providers in helping them conform to privacy law. We describe different possible architectures for such privacy management in cloud computing, give an algebraic description of obfuscation features provided by the privacy manager, and describe how policies may be defined to control such obfuscation. Furthermore, we assess the performance and scalability of this approach and consider mechanisms to enhance usability. Several examples of how the privacy manager might be used are given, including protection of private metadata associated with online photos and of confidential information contained within share portfolios.

Transfer pricing practices of transnational corporations in PATA countries

The tax authorities of Australia, Canada, Japan and the United States formed the Pacific Association of Tax Administrators (PATA) in 1980 to combat income shifting, improve cross-border information flows, and develop conciliatory relationships among themselves. One of their specific concerns was to identify and stop the improper transfer pricing used by transnational corporations (TNCs) to facilitate income shifting and obfuscation of financial data. The purpose of this study is to determine: (1) what PATA membership means for TNCs, and (2) whether or not transfer pricing audits have increased due to information sharing or decreased due to PATA's various transfer pricing guides. A survey of tax executives in Australian, Canadian, Japanese, and U.S. TNCs was undertaken to determine the answers to these questions, and to develop policy and procedure recommendations for both the TNCs and their respective tax authorities. Unexpected findings emerged about the relationship between transfer pricing behaviors and audit frequency, and between audit risk and advance pricing agreement status.